Much of the stuff on my Facebook feed is the same stuff that everybody’s been saying for the last year. The Hillary people are blaming the Sanders people and the Sanders people are blaming the DNC, and the Trump people are calling the Hillary people whiny crybabies, and everybody is calling the Trump people knuckle dragging mouth breathers. Not that all of this is inaccurate, but it is repetitive and unproductive.
The whining about the Electoral College, the issue du jour, is repetitive in a long cycle. Every four years, when people are reminded it exists, they bitch about it. I would not object to scrapping it, but I see it as a minor detail. A quirk of the system, rather than a major flaw. Consider the way Republicans demanded term limits after FDR. You have to realize that the shoe, the next time, might be on the other foot.
There were a couple of well written pieces I read today. There was one from Robert Reich, and one from Michael Moore, talking about what we need to do now.
One of my Bernie or Bust buddies went off on Moore, saying we couldn’t trust him after he’d supported Hillary, but that’s just a ridiculous expectation of ideological purity. If the Sanders crowd expects to have any influence, we can’t reject everybody who chose the more moderate, saner seeming path after the primaries. We can’t reject Moore, and Reich, and Sarah Silverman, and even Al Franken or Elizabeth Warren, though they turned on Bernie well before it was even necessary. You can have a broad coalition, with more tolerance for different viewpoints, or you can have a small coalition,with more precise stands but not enough people to win elections, but you can’t have both.
What we truly need, I think, is a more intelligent, and less repetitive, conversation. That includes everybody.